Photo Realism

[Jaffrin]

Here is a series of images, The original color photo, the B&W, and the Graphite Photo Realism I attempted.
I have never taken an art class, and I do not draw... this is my first attempt at anything of this nature.
I would appreciate some feed back on my work as well as techniques which I can use to attain greater accuracy with each attempt.

http://members.fortunecity.com/thiefs_dream/Photo_01.JPG http://members.fortunecity.com/thiefs_dream/Photo_02.JPG http://members.fortunecity.com/thiefs_dream/Photo_00.JPG

[mtw]

It looks to be going good so far. The flower and some of the shadows need some darkening.

[ChyChsco]

Looks great. Proportions are good and everything... however, you are afraid of using dark values. Except for the object in the lower right, the whole peice needs to be darker in general.

Aside from that, very nice.

[drdarrow]

http://www.Darrowart.com/images/redchannel.jpg

I think you might, if it's not too late, get better results from a differnt source photo. Converting color to grayscale does NOT give you the same results as shooting with black and white. All you're doing is using a computer algorithm to guess at what looks like the right translation from colors to values. Clearly, the flower came out too dark in the original.

What I did here was download your original color image, then copied the 256-gray red channel only (in Photoshop) into a new document. I adjusted the midrange a touch brighter, and deepened the dark end. I left the highlight end alone.

The flower looks much more llike what you'd expect.

Usually, a combo of red and green channels work. The blue channel is almost always dark and very grainy.

BTW -- good photorealism does include editing for the sake of realism. This radiating lines in the napkin are probably unnecessary, out of balance and attention-grabbing. Knowing what to leave out is what makes the artist, not how faithfully he or she copies. We have Xerox, Canon, Mita and Savin for that.

[mtw]

Originally posted by drdarrow
Clearly, the flower came out too dark in the original.[/B]
I think it came out just right. From a value range of 1 to 10, 10 being darkest, red is about 6. When you're looking at a fairly saturated red color, it's easy to think of it as a higher value than it actually is. Your version makes it look like it could be a white or yellow flower.